My parents don’t have much energy to notice, dealing as they are with their own confrontation with the new. “Your father,” my mother tells me, “has cancer, and we don’t know how long he’s going to live”; the statement’s that plain and straightforward. The cancer is a melanoma, a blue-black mole on his back the color of my childhood experiments with mold on bread. It had been there always but suddenly bloomed. By the time his doctor sent him to a surgeon at UCLA, who’d cut the silver-dollar-size invader from the center of his back, it was too late; the cancer had gone into his lymph nodes, and from there it seemed only a matter of time, and perhaps not much at that.

We drive to UCLA once a week, where I walk around Westwood (bracing sense of a city, magazine stores, cafés, unknown life) while he goes to chemotherapy, some experimental procedure involving large doses of estrogen. The side effects are unpleasant: paler, weak some days, plagued by diarrhea, losing body hair, and developing breasts, he keeps working anyway.

A new sort of campaign begins, to ensure that my father and I have time together while we can; it isn’t spoken, exactly, but I understand that the intention is that I will remember him in these ways. He takes me places: to a Chinese temple, with a flowery Confucian altar crowded with gods, where men toss yarrow sticks and the air’s sweet with thick incense. On a hike into the Sierras, a long hike to a place called Feather Canyon Falls; it must be awful for him, really, walking the nine miles in and out with me, weak as he feels, but we want to reach the falls, which seems the point of the hike through the dark shade of the evergreens. He wants me to have this adventure with him.

But it’s a doomed campaign, in essence, since there isn’t a connection between us already; we don’t feel that click which can’t quite be willed, and there’s never a sense of real ease between us.

I wonder if—when he bent his face to kiss the top of my infant head—something about me smelled different, some whiff on the skin signaling: You will never be entirely at home with this boy? Or did it take a while, until the first gesture or phrase or tilt of the hips that made him stop and assess me, apprehending—did he name it to himself, directly?—what he hadn’t seen before.